


Montoya.

by seagullsong



Category: Princess Bride (1987), The Princess Bride - Simon Morgenstern, The Princess Bride - William Goldman
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Book/Movie Fusion, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Miracles, Revenge, Swordfighting, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 06:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5196200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seagullsong/pseuds/seagullsong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>20 fragments from the life and history of Domingo Montoya's only son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Montoya.

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: This is self-indulgent trans fic that I wrote as a sad teenager and I make no apologies for it. It is also set in a canon where magic and true love exist but modern gender theory doesn’t- this is advance warning that the character in question often uses female pronouns for his childhood self/other parts of himself. He doesn't possess the conceptual tools/social norms to think of his gender as something immutable or unrelated to the shape of his body.

1.

Domingo Montoya’s wife went into labor in the morning, and by the afternoon she was dead.

A procession took her body to the little church, and Father Martín said the blessing over her grave. Although the people of Arabella had found Sr. Montoya to be a difficult neighbor, they had loved Imelda for her remedies, natural and miraculous. So the villagers came and wept and embraced Domingo until he snarled at them, and then they went away again. As he watched, the freshly turned dirt baked red under the sun.

In the early evening, an old woman came out of the church and took him firmly by the arm, and Domingo was led back inside. In the cool dark, another woman was sitting, holding an infant at her breast. The child his wife had died for was pressed into his arms. 

He looked at the baby. The baby looked at him.

He christened her Imelda.

 

2.

Imelda Montoya grew up skinny and motherless and hungry. She almost never went to school, and she didn't have friends so much as she had a pack of village boys who would chase her around and try to hit each other with sticks. 

She was fantastically happy.

Because of her father. Domingo Montoya was funny-looking and crotchety and impatient and absent-minded and rarely smiled. 

Imelda loved him. Totally. Don’t ask why; there were more reasons than she could count. (Literally. She couldn’t count very high yet.)

“Father”, she would say, “Pío ambushed me behind the big rock this morning, but his grip is bad, I knocked the stick right out of his hand”, and Domingo would squint at her and cluck his tongue. 

“Ambushed?” he'd say. “You should have been sitting on the rock, stupid child. High, get up high and no one will ever ambush you again”, and smile one of his rare, dazzling, thin-lipped smiles.

Domingo was a sword maker, which meant that Imelda was a sword maker’s assistant. And before his injury Domingo had been a swordfighter, which meant that Imelda was a swordfighter's pupil. She spent hours watching her father work, perched on his workbench like a young crow, clever mind and bright eyes and the glow of the forge, and Domingo snapping his fingers for the tools she would hand him as he shaped the blade.

And so Imelda grew. And as she grew, things changed.

 

3.

Imelda Montoya was three hours old when her father christened her for the first time. When he christened her for the second time, she was nine years old, and he never knew he had done it.

It was only a slip of the tongue. Inigo Montoya the first had been Domingo’s little brother, a quiet boy who lived to be six years old before dying of a fever. Imelda, a slight child with messy curls, looked remarkably like him. “Inigo, fetch me some water”- it was an easy mistake to make, and since his daughter didn’t seem particularly upset about the incident, Domingo forgot about it.

Inigo did not.

Imelda Montoya Escarrà was mostly the name of a dead woman. At the age of nine, Domingo’s child did not appreciate the concept of honoring her mother. She worshiped her father; she was a Montoya first, and she was a Montoya only. She did not know of the ghost in the name Domingo had given her, did not feel him reaching out his small hand through the veil, but she liked the way the name had sounded in her father's voice. Liked the way that it had still meant her. 

 

4.

Inigo was twelve years old when the six-fingered man rode into Arrabella and offered her father the chance to be an artist. She had few friends, a great love for the blade, and an aimless sadness that she never spoke of, because her father never spoke of his. Nothing was as important as his work. Nothing was as important as the sword.

Even in the hut’s darkness, it glittered. 

 

5.

The six-fingered sword cut out Domingo’s heart and Inigo’s life fell to nothing around her. She had never thought to imagine that a broken heart could make a sound, but here she was screaming, her heart was screaming, her father was dead and she could not stop screaming.

The village heard her. Fear ran from house to house, and people with grave, tired eyes listened to the six-fingered man’s excuses from their doorsteps. A mother's arms reached out to hold Inigo, but she pulled away and ran after him, still clutching the sword.

“Coward!”

Count Ruben whirled to face his assailant. There in the road stood a skinny girlchild, wielding a bloody sword far too large for her, tears leaving tracks down her dust-covered face. He turned away from her and braced himself to mount his horse. The child took another step forward. 

“Pig! Coward, pig, killer!”

“Someone take that sword away before she hurts herself”, he said, and Inigo flew at him, enraged, and blocked the horse’s path.

“I, Imelda Montoya, do challenge you, coward, pig, killer, ass, fool, to battle.”

“Get her out of the way. Move the infant.”

“The infant is twelve and she stays!”

“Enough of your family is dead for one day, girl. Be content.”

“When you beg me for your breath, then I shall be contented. Now dismount!”

He dismounted.

“Draw your sword”.

He drew it.

“Begin”, she said, and moved into a fighter’s stance.

The six-fingered man did not move, and that was strange.

“Begin”, she commanded.

The man only shook his head, and that was frustrating.

“Stand and fight!” she yelled.

“I do not fight little girls”, he said, and that was intolerable. 

She ran at him in a blind rage- stupid, stupid, wasn’t that was the first thing Yeste and her father had ever taught her? In a swordfight, Imelda, you can lose your temper or you can win, but never both. If she had real talent, if the beginnings of her genius were visible even that young, she never had the chance to show it. The six-fingered man caught her off balance in seconds.

The magnificent sword tumbled onto the dusty road.

Inigo stood and met the nobleman’s eyes firmly, ready to accept her death.

“I do not kill little girls either”, he said, “but you are lacking in manners, and as your father is no longer here to give you lessons in them, I shall leave you with a reminder.” And his sword flashed twice in the sun.

The villagers gasped and murmured as twin rivers of blood poured down the girl’s face. The cuts down her face were not deep, but everyone knew at once that Imelda was scarred for life. She would never be beautiful.

Domingo’s child stood straight in the road, shaking and defiant.

The nobleman replaced his sword and rode on, and finally Inigo let herself fall.

 

6.

She awoke to Yeste’s big face, a moon in the darkness.

“I failed him”, she whispered. “Yeste, I could not even fight for him.”

Yeste’s sad eyes, his choked voice. “Sleep”, he managed to say, and stroked her head.

 

7.

The year Inigo spent living in Yeste’s house was the most miserable of her entire life. This was certainly not her new guardian's intention. If anything, he indulged her too much. But Yeste had loved his friend nearly as much as Inigo had loved her father, and he could find a reason to weep in anything; the sight of her scars, an empty chair, the play of sunlight over metal. His great body shook with tears. 

Inigo resented Yeste for his theatrical grief. And beyond that, she resented him for not seeing her own unhappiness, which to be fair it must be said she was doing her level best to hide from him. She was unhappy about going to school in the city, feeling ugly and loud and stupid next to the city girls. She was unhappy about her body, which was doing all sorts of horrible things without her permission. For the first time, she was unhappy about not having a mother, who could certainly have warned her about those things in advance. And she felt Domingo’s absence more strongly every day. She grieved not only for her father, but also for a world she had never known, in which Domingo had called her Inigo and meant it. She felt, perhaps unreasonably, as if the six-fingered-man had stolen that world from her, as if someday her father could have said that name again and soothed her twisted heart as easily as he straightened bent metal over the forge. It had always been an impossible notion, but now Domingo was dead and it was inconceivable, and the gulf of meaning between those two words felt wider every day. 

Her hatred for the six-fingered-man grew like a wildfire in her heart.

 

8.

The one shining, glorious thing about her life at Yeste’s were the sword lessons. Where Domingo and Yeste’s teaching had been haphazard and sporadic, the fencing master Yeste’s money had bought for her was relentless. Every day he demanded more from her than the day before, and she astonished both of them by providing it.

Often in the late afternoon they would stop drilling and duel, a golden flurry of movement around the courtyard. She drove herself until her breathing was labored and ragged, and the fencing master was impressed by the intensity in Imelda’s movement, the rareness of her missteps, how quickly she learned.

Once, on a day like any other, he caught her joyful eyes and saw the promise of genius there.

It is never easy to see what you have not been taught to see. Certainly, no one had ever taught this man to see the potential of a master swordfighter in his employer's orphaned ward, a girl from a family of no standing whatsoever. The idea threw him for a moment, just a moment, and in that slight hesitation Inigo slipped under his guard and lifted her sword to his throat. 

The thrill of it almost stopped his breath. To have his student surpass him, when he had never expected it of her - it was incredible. As Inigo stepped back, he shook his head with the wonder of it.

“You have great talent”, he told her. “Indeed, you have reached the limit of my teaching. It is a great shame- if you were a boy I would enter you in a contest, and you would teach the world your name.” And then he left.

(Do not think too unkindly of him for not suggesting she try for greatness despite her sex. There is a limit to the sight of those only just unblinkered. And, as it turned out, Inigo would have made a poor candidate for Spain’s first famous swordswoman.)

 

9.

An hour after the departure of her master found Inigo still slumped in the shade of the courtyard wall, trying to cry silently, so as to avoid attracting attention. Earlier she had twirled the sword in her hand, around and around, silent and unseeing, but now she tore at the moss of the stone wall and wept. Had you been a boy. To hear it named- oh, to hear it named pulled it out of her like a leech sucking bad blood. Already she could feel the aching want of it, the unhappiness that stretched back through her memories, the parts of Imelda’s soul that had never quite made sense. The pain of her body’s desire not to be itself had finally crystallized, cutting her innards like shards of glass. How? How could a need this momentous have eluded her for so long?

But it is never easy to see what we have not been taught to see- not even in ourselves.

 

(An interlude-

In such moments, when you have found something inside yourself that you did not wish to find, some horrible thing lurking in the darkness, something that you had not found earlier only because you had sensed it in the darkness behind you and refused to turn towards it, refused to give it form- in these moments, there is a choice. 

To turn towards yourself, or to turn away.

There is no shame in the alienation of the self in order to preserve the self. Only a deep sadness.)

 

10.

Inigo Montoya turned towards himself, and looked at the darkness through the fingers of one metaphorical hand. He did not know if what he saw was truth, necessarily. But he saw his own desire, and he saw opportunity. 

As a boy, he could study fencing in truth, with all the masters of the world. He could make himself into a tool, a sword in the hand of destiny. He did not let himself dwell on his desire. He did not even give himself time to begin to be afraid. Before the week was out he was gone from Yeste’s house. He left only a note on the table, which Yeste found on a lovely summer morning and read with trembling hands.

I have something to begin, and a fight to finish. My father’s spirit does not rest. Dear Yeste, do not worry for me too much.

-I. M.

 

11.

First, there was the training.

Inigo ran, jumped, lifted rocks, squeezed rocks. Her body learned that it would have to work despite the pain, and gave up complaining about it. And still, she was not strong as she wanted to be. No matter. She kept working. Few people have the strength of will to do what Inigo did to her body that year, but then again, few people have ever craved vengeance in quite the same way. Domingo's death had broken something in Inigo.

When she felt strong enough, she put on a nice dress, went to the best fencing teacher in the city, and was politely turned away.

She went to a good fencing teacher, and was rudely turned away.

In desperation, she went to a tavern where she had heard fighters met, and asked if anyone there could teach her swordplay. When the laughter died down, a stout woman drew her aside and explained that if she was in a hurry to learn how to fight, she should by all means keep coming alone to strange taverns at night and saying things like that.

Inigo tried all those places again, this time dressed in her usual shirt and trousers with her chest bound. She walked with a confidence she did not yet feel, and discovered that slight, girlish boys with little money and no family connections faired only slightly better in such matters. But slightly better was, in fact, still better. Inigo Montoya was eventually employed in the service of a mediocre fencing teacher who was happy to pay nearly all of his wages with lessons.

Inigo exhausted everything that teacher knew, and then he found another. And after that, another. He grew more certain of his quest every day. He would find the six fingered man. He would kill the six fingered man. He would avenge his father.

Unfortunately, he was also beginning to have a problem.

And it was with that “he”.

Imelda was growing more and more reluctant to leave Inigo behind at the end of the day. She would slip him on each morning, go into town, work and train and study, and then come home and find that he didn't want to be taken off. She found herself being Inigo by herself, in her little rented room. She didn’t have any reason to be Imelda. Well. No reason but fear and shame. 

Those are powerful motivators.

But as she aged, Imelda became more difficult to conceal. It hurt, to wrap her breasts, and it weighed her down with sadness, and it constricted his breathing during his exercises. His lack of facial hair at this age brought only teasing; in a few years it would bring suspicion.

Inigo sat in his room, considering his conundrum. He thought about God, he thought about the six fingered man, he thought about Yeste, as always he thought about his father…

And then, for the first time in a long while, Inigo thought about his mother.

 

12.

On the doorway of a small, perfectly normal cottage, Inigo Montoya lifted his hand to knock, and hesitated. He had hiked for days to get here, following the directions of farmers, barely sleeping after news of a thief on the road. But once he actually knocked, that would be it, he’d be in this for real-

There was a thunk, and a slot in the door slid open, revealing a pair of bright eyes surrounded by dark, wrinkled skin.

“I haven’t got all day to stand around, sonny. What do you want?” the old woman said. (Later in his life, standing on a similar doorstep, Inigo would wonder if there was some sort of school where magical people went to learn how to be old and crotchety and disagreeable.)

“I need a miracle”, he said.

The miracle woman snorted. “No, I don’t have a potion to give you a big hard cock. Fuck off.” She slammed the little sliding door closed.

Inigo stared at it in shock, her heart in her throat. She’d known that her disguise wasn’t great, but she hadn’t realized it was this bad. How many other people had seen the truth at once? Would they come for her, would she die here, in this strange village that looked so much like her own? Did all miracle women have mouths that filthy? She steeled her nerves and knocked again, even more firmly, and the slot slid open again.

“What?” snapped the old woman's mouth. Inigo leaned closer to the door.

“How could you tell- what I was here for?” she asked in a low voice.

“Ha! You’re a teenage boy, what else could you possibly want? Cocks, cocks, cocks- that and love potions, that’s all it ever is, all day long the whining, and your lot never have any money, I’m sick of it I tell you, absolutely sick to death of teenagers, now go away and leave me alone!”

Inigo bounced on his toes, his whole body light with relief, his pulse fluttering like the wings of a little bird.

“I swear”, he said, “I swear on my honor, this is different. I have a challenge for you…and I can pay”.

The slot in the door slammed closed again, and then there was a creak, and the real door opened a crack, with the miracle woman peering out from behind it. “What kind of a challenge?” she asked suspiciously, and Inigo grinned.

 

13.

Inigo slept on the floor of Lucia’s hut for three nights while she worked. 

“Creating a recipe from scratch takes time”, she explained, stirring something green, “but I have high hopes for this one. I made something like it before, once, 'cept the other way around. And no, I don’t know where she is now”, the old woman added, seeing Inigo’s startled interest. “You sure about this, kid?”

He sighed, and let his head sink back against the wall. “I doubt myself every minute of every day”, he confessed to her. “This plan is crazy, unnatural, maybe evil. But I am not a scholar, so I do not fear for my sanity. And I am not a priest, so I do not fear for my soul. I am a fighter; I listen to my body. And my body, as it is, feels like a poorly-made sword, gilded, but weak and brittle.” He opened his eyes. “Does that make sense, señora?

“Not in the least”, she said, cheerfully. “Hand me the powdered hen’s teeth, would you?”

(Inigo was lying about the fear, of course. Arabella was Catholic. Of course he was afraid about his soul.)

 

14.

He filled his hours by chopping Lucia’s firewood, feeding her chickens, and running for hours along the trails in the wood. If he let himself stop moving he would start thinking again, and the doubt and the fear would come creeping in. Inigo was unused to doubt. It did not suit him. He ran and ran until Imelda's mind was blank, and each night he fell exhausted into sleep, and the murmur of Lucia’s voice as she worked followed him into his dreams.

On the morning of the fourth day Inigo awoke to see Lucia standing over him, holding a cheap tin goblet full of something that smelled like rotten fish.

“Drink up!” she told him cheerfully, pressing it into his hand.

Inigo lifted the cup to his lips, and then hesitated. He’d never been one for questioning authority, but- “You’re sure this is safe?” he asked.

“Look, I’ll tell you what”, said the miracle woman, “if it kills you, I’ll give you a refund.”

Inigo drank.

 

15.

A week of fever and retching later, the little fencer awoke again, this time very much changed. Lucia was well pleased with the results, although the process left something to be desired. She’d have to refine the recipe a bit, if she didn’t want to end up playing nursemaid to another shaking teenager. Not that she was all that likely to need this particular brew again, but better safe than sorry. She didn’t make a very good nursemaid. 

Inigo was clearly a young man now, albeit currently a rather pale and sickly one. The kid’s chest had flattened out, and some of the fat around his belly and hips had melted away. His face still had the soft, unfinished look of youth, but his jaw was more angular, and yesterday he’d been delighted to discover that he needed to shave. 

Lucia didn’t think the boy would ever be especially hairy or especially muscular, and she couldn’t make him any taller; but as for that, he had been rather tall already, and since he appeared to be a fencer the thin-and-wiry thing would probably serve him well. 

She was not exactly certain whether anything else had changed. As she had implied to Inigo when they first met, spells that affected genitals were unpredictable at best, and this was quite a dramatic change indeed. But the boy didn’t mention it, so Lucia didn’t ask. Some things, she thought, were better left private.

Inigo left her house two days after the potion finished its work, the same way all her customers did- flat broke and full of gratitude. 

 

16.

Yeste was sitting in his office, dithering over the horrid necessity of raising his prices yet again, when he heard the door open.

“Please go away”, he said, without looking up. “The waiting list is two years long, and the price is so high I am embarrassed to mention it. Have your sword made by someone else.”

“I already have a sword”, his visitor said, and Yeste looked up. In the doorway, framed by blazing sunlight, was Domingo Montoya Mendoza, holding the glorious weapon he had died for. And then he was inside, standing once again in Yeste’s front parlor. For a long moment, Yeste could not speak.

“I’ve never met a ghost before”, he finally managed. For this was certainly a spirit; this was Domingo as Yeste always pictured him, in the strength of his youth- but stronger and more beautiful than the man had ever truly been in life. The apparition smiled at him.

“I am no ghost”, the visitor said, and raised the great sword to gently trace a line down each side of his face, along the vicious scars that Yeste, in his astonishment, had not seen.

Let it never be said that Yeste was slow on the uptake. “Imelda!” he cried, surging to his feet. “I have grown fatter since you left”, he said, when it took him a moment to pull himself out of his chair. “I eat when I am sad. You- what have you done, child?”

And so the whole story came out. Inigo told the story of his quest, travels, training, and miracle to a most appreciative audience. Yeste gasped in all the right places, interrupted time and again to scold him for taking such incredible risks, and ran his hand frequently over Inigo’s face in astonishment.

When Inigo had finished all the parts of the story that he wanted to tell, Yeste folded his hands over his belly and frowned thoughtfully at the young man in front of him. 

“I have a question”, he said gravely, and Inigo nodded. “Did you do- this”, he said, making a gesture that seemed to encompass Inigo’s entire existence, “for your father, or…for yourself?”

Inigo shrugged. In truth, he did not know the answer. There was very little distinction between the person he had always been and the person loving Domingo had made him. It is often this way, with fathers and sons.

Yeste still look troubled, but he waved away the question like a bothersome fly. “No matter”, he said, “I do not understand it, but it is done. You have become a great swordfighter, you say? Come, show me what you can do, Inigo. Imelda. Inigo. This is mad, but Inigo, we must never speak of who you used to be again- I will get mixed up, and give it all away.”

It disturbed Inigo, to have Imelda’s past destroyed so casually, but he knew Yeste had the right idea. This was the lie he would have to get used to telling, if he was to live this truth. 

 

17.

Inigo knew that Yeste’s plan was wise, but as the years passed and he sank further and further into failure it grew harder and harder to remember why. He found himself wanting to speak of his strange transformation. There was so little to him besides his story- he wanted to tell it fully and completely, at least to the people who mattered. The first girl he ever kissed. Giulietta. Westley and Buttercup. Fezzik.

He did not tell the girl; he was worried she would spread rumors. He did not tell Giulietta; he was worried she would not love him. He did not tell Westley and Buttercup; they were so beautiful and in love that to intrude on their happiness with his pain was unbearable. 

But one night, he did tell Fezzik.

It was autumn in a foreign land, and they were camped on the shore of a lake. Vizzini had left several hours ago, muttering something about his next plan, which he refused to tell them anything about. That left Fezzik and Inigo nothing to do but get out some wine and wait for him, sitting around the campfire. 

Actually, Inigo was mostly lying down. That was the wine’s fault. He was staggeringly drunk, alternating between staring moodily into the fire and regaling Fezzik with stories about his adventures chasing the six-fingered-man.

He heard himself say, as if from a great distance, “I used to be a girl, you know.”

Fezzik didn’t even blink. “Must have been a long time ago”, he rhymed.

“Very long”, Inigo agreed. “Ages. But I- I got a miracle. It’s alright now”, he reassured his friend. “Alright. All right.” Speaking English was always harder when he was drunk. It made all the words sound made-up and clumsy on his tongue. It seemed very important that Fezzik knew that everything was alright.

Fezzik patted him clumsily on his shoulder, so much like Domingo that Inigo felt tears well up in the corner of his eyes. 

“Don’t cry”, Fezzik said, concerned.

“Why can’t I cry, my father is dead and I’ve failed him, Fezzik, I’ve failed him, and I’ll never even get to tell him he had a son...” Inigo trailed off, weeping into the sand, the embodiment of wretchedness.

“You really were a girl?”

“Yes. Well, almost.” Inigo was quiet for a moment, gathering the thoughts that seemed to dart away from his wine-soaked mind like fireflies. “I was a girl, so they thought I actually was one”, he said, uncertain if that was really the best way of putting it. “I let them think it; it seemed easiest.”

Fezzik nodded. That was a problem that he understood right down to his bones. “They think I’m a brute”, he said. 

“You’re a good man”, Inigo slurred. 

“Thank you Inigo, so are you”, his friend said. He wasn’t really sure if Inigo was being serious about this whole miracle thing, or whether this was the wine talking. But either way, it was true enough.

Inigo smiled, and passed out.

 

18\. 

Count Rugen’s knife is in his stomach and his knees are giving out beneath him and the only reason he is still standing up is the wall at his back. The shock of this final failure is icy water in his veins. “I’m sorry father”, he whispers. “I tried.”

The six fingered man advances on him, smirking. He is older now, but his cold face is straight out of Imelda’s memories. 

“Who is this father you keep mentioning?” the Count asks.

“You killed him”, Inigo says, stupidly.

“Its possible- I kill a lot of people”, the Count replies, and Inigo does not know what to do. The pain that had shaped his entire life isn't even a footnote in his enemy’s. In all the times this scene has played out in her head, this is not something he had ever considered. How can he make him remember?

He lifts his father’s sword, and oh yes- this, the villain remembers. 

“My god” he says, his eyes alight with wonderous cruelty as he watches the blade. “Are you”- he sees the scars- “you’re that little Spanish brat I taught a lesson to all those years ago! I took you for a girl, at the time.”

Inigo says nothing, focuses on breathing.

The Count frowns, and then peers at his victim with new eyes. “Simply incredible”, he breathes. “Did you mutilate yourself and chase me all this time, just to fail now? I think that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. How marvelous.”

Imelda hears him, but she isn’t listening. She is listening to the voices of her teachers in her head, berating her for her failure. Inigo struggles to stand.

Rugen’s eyes narrow. “Good heavens. Are you still trying to win? You’ve got an overdeveloped sense of vengeance, girl. It’s going to get you into trouble someday.”

He stabs at Inigo, but Inigo has trained for this all his life. His body moves to deflect the blow before his mind can even process it.

“Hello”, he says. “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

“Inigo cannot be your name.”

“Inigo isn’t the important part.” Inigo steps forward, his fist shoved into his guts to stop the bleeding. “Hello”, he says again. "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!” 

There is fear in Count Rugen’s eyes

“Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

The Count is falling back and an apparition of death is advancing on him, parrying every thrust, his injured body kept upright through sheer strength of will.

“Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father! Prepare to die!’

“STOP SAYING THAT”, Rugen shrieks, and Inigo steps forward and stabs him in the shoulder. 

“HELLO. MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA. YOU KILLED MY FATHER. PREPARE TO DIE.”

“No!” Rugen calls out, and Montoya slashes a cut down his left cheek.

“Offer me money”, the swordsman says, shaking.

“Yes”, Rugen says.

“Power too, promise me that!” Another slash of the beautiful sword, another cut, parallel to the first.

“All that I have and more! Please”, Rugen begs. He has studied pain for a lifetime and never understood it as he does in this moment, bleeding from half a dozen shallow wounds, fear strangling his mind, his whole being trapped by the gaze of a man whose eyes are pits of despair to put the real one to shame.

“Offer me everything I ask for!”

“Anything you want”, Rugen pleads.

Imelda’s screams echo down the years. “I want my father back, you son of a bitch”, Inigo chokes out, and-

 

19.

There is nothing so glorious in this world as the brief moment after you have succeeded at something which has meant a great deal to you.

And nothing so empty as the moment after that, when you are purposeless once more, alone with yourself.

 

20.

But as we know, Inigo Montoya was not alone for long. They were four, riding hard for the coast on the fastest horses in the kingdom. And the night was filled with the crescendoing sounds of pursuit...

**Author's Note:**

> Bilingual bonus: according to the internet, Inigo’s maternal surname is Castilian for “left-handed”, which he isn’t.
> 
> I'm gonna publish this and then read through it again for mistakes, otherwise I'll never get around to publishing it. Let me know if I've made any obvious SPAG errors, please, but other than that I'm not looking for concrit. I'm just letting this story go because I've been carrying it around for far too long.


End file.
